This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral - Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking! - in America's Gilded Capital

The great thing about Washington is no matter how many elections you lose, how many times you're indicted, how many scandals you've been tainted by, well, the great thing is you can always eat lunch in that town again. What keeps the permanent government spinning on its carousel is the freedom of shamelessness, and that mother's milk of politics, cash. What Julia Phillips did for Hollywood, Timothy Crouse did for journalists, and Michael Lewis did for Wall Street, Mark Leibovich does for our nation's capital.

Citizens of the Green Room: Profiles in Courage and Self-Delusion

Author of the groundbreaking number-one New York Times bestseller This Town, Mark Leibovich returns with a masterly collection of portraits of Washington's elite, and wannabe elites. Hailed by The Washington Post as a "master of the political profile," Leibovich has spent his career writing memorable, buzz-worthy, and often jaw-dropping features about politicians and other notables.

Double Down: Game Change 2012

Drawing on hundreds of interviews with the people who lived the story, Heilemann and Halperin deliver another reportorial tour de force that reads like a fast-paced novel. Character driven and dialogue rich, replete with extravagantly detailed scenes, Double Down offers a panoramic account of a campaign at once intensely hard fought and lastingly consequential. For Obama, the victory he achieved meant even more to him than the one he had pulled off four years earlier.

Believer: My Forty Years in Politics

The man behind some of the greatest political changes of the last decade, David Axelrod has devoted a lifetime to questioning political certainties and daring to bring fresh thinking into the political landscape. Whether as a child hearing John F. Kennedy stump in New York or as a strategist guiding the first African American to the White House, Axelrod shows in Believer how his own life stands at the center of the tumultuous American century.

Muse: A Novel

Paul Dukach is heir apparent at Purcell & Stern, one of the last independent publishing houses in New York, whose shabby offices on Union Square belie the treasures on its list. Working with his boss, the flamboyant Homer Stern, Paul learns the ins and outs of the book trade - how to work an agent over lunch; how to swim with the literary sharks at the Frankfurt Book Fair; and, most important, how to nurse the fragile egos of the dazzling, volatile authors he adores.

The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court

Based on exclusive interviews with justices themselves, The Nine tells the story of the Supreme Court through personalities, from Anthony Kennedy's overwhelming sense of self-importance to Clarence Thomas' well-tended grievances against his critics to David Souter's odd 19th-century lifestyle. There is also, for the first time, the full behind-the-scenes story of Bush v. Gore and Sandra Day O'Connor's fateful breach with George W. Bush, the president she helped place in office.

The Stranger: Barack Obama in the White House

In The Stranger, NBC Chief White House Correspondent Chuck Todd draws upon his unprecedented inner-circle sources to create a gripping account of Obama's tumultuous White House years. In doing so, not only does Todd give us the most revealing portrait yet of this fascinating president and his struggles, but illuminates what "Obamism" really is, what the president stands for, and how his decisions have changed - and will change - American politics for generations.

The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns

Renegade thinkers are crashing the gates of a venerable American institution, shoving aside its so-called wise men and replacing them with a radical new data-driven order. We’ve seen it in sports, and now in The Victory Lab, journalist Sasha Issenberg tells the hidden story of the analytical revolution upending the way political campaigns are run in the 21st century.

HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton’s surprising defeat in the 2008 Democratic primary brought her to the nadir of her political career, vanquished by a much younger opponent whose message of change and cutting-edge tech team ran circles around her stodgy campaign. And yet, six years later, she has reemerged as an even more powerful and influential figure, a formidable stateswoman and the presumed front-runner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, marking one of the great political comebacks in history.

Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich

In his New York Times best-selling books Extortion and Throw Them All Out, Schweizer detailed patterns of official corruption in Washington that led to congressional resignations and new ethics laws. In Clinton Cash he follows the Clinton money trail, revealing the connection between their personal fortune, their close personal friends, the Clinton Foundation, foreign nations, and some of the highest ranks of government.

Scott Salmans says:"Everyone should know how corrupt the Clintons are!"

Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime

Based on hundreds of interviews with the people who lived the story, Game Change is a reportorial tour de force that reads like a fast-paced novel. Character driven and dialogue rich, replete with extravagantly detailed scenes, this is the occasion-ally shocking, often hilarious, ultimately definitive account of the campaign of a lifetime.

Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America

Four years ago, a bright young presidential candidate named Barack Obama campaigned on a theme of hope and change, and made history. Today, he finds himself in another bitter, divisive presidential race but without the buzzwords. Instead, an embattled president struggles with a dysfunctionally divided Congress, a controversial healthcare bill, a decade-long war, and a stagnant economy.

The Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington

In the years after World War II, Georgetown's leafy streets were home to an unlikely group of cold warriors: a coterie of affluent, well-educated, and well-connected civilians who helped steer American strategy from the Marshall Plan through McCarthyism, Vietnam, and the endgame of Watergate.

The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap

Poverty goes up. Crime goes down. The prison population doubles. Fraud by the rich wipes out 40 percent of the world’s wealth. The rich get massively richer. No one goes to jail. In search of a solution, journalist Matt Taibbi discovered the Divide, the seam in American life where our two most troubling trends - growing wealth inequality and mass incarceration - come together, driven by a dramatic shift in American citizenship: Our basic rights are now determined by our wealth or poverty.

Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

Theirs was the most captivating American political partnership since Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger: a bold and untested president and his seasoned, relentless vice president. Confronted by one crisis after another, they struggled to protect the country, remake the world, and define their own relationship along the way. In Days of Fire, Peter Baker chronicles the history of the most consequential presidency in modern times through the prism of its two most compelling characters, capturing the elusive and shifting alliance of George Walker Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney as no historian has done before.

The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House

America's first families are unknowable in many ways. No one has insight into their true character like the people who serve their meals and make their beds every day. Full of stories and details by turns dramatic, humorous, and heartwarming, The Residence reveals daily life in the White House as it is really lived through the voices of the maids, butlers, cooks, florists, doormen, engineers, and others who tend to the needs of the president and first family.

The Price of Politics

Based on 18 months of reporting, Woodward's 17th book The Price of Politics is an intimate, documented examination of how President Obama and the highest profile Republican and Democratic leaders in the United States Congress attempted to restore the American economy and improve the federal government's fiscal condition over three and one half years. The Price of Politics addresses the key issue of the presidential and congressional campaigns: the condition of the American economy.

The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism

Goodwin describes the broken friendship between Teddy Roosevelt and his chosen successor, William Howard Taft. With the help of the "muckraking" press, Roosevelt had wielded the Bully Pulpit to challenge and triumph over abusive monopolies, political bosses, and corrupting money brokers. Roosevelt led a revolution that he bequeathed to Taft only to see it compromised as Taft surrendered to money men and big business. The rupture led Roosevelt to run against Taft for president, an ultimately futile race that gave power away to the Democrats.

Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics

For decades, history has considered Tammany Hall, New York's famous political machine, shorthand for the worst of urban politics: graft, crime, and patronage personified by notoriously corrupt characters. Infamous crooks like William "Boss" Tweed dominate traditional histories of Tammany, distorting our understanding of a critical chapter of American political history. In Machine Made, historian and New York City journalist Terry Golway convincingly dismantles these stereotypes.

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

From one of America's most talented historians and winner of a LA Times Book Prize comes a brilliant new account of Richard Nixon that reveals the riveting backstory to the red state/blue state resentments that divide our nation today. Told with urgency and sharp political insight, Nixonland recaptures America's turbulent 1960s and early 1970s and reveals how Richard Nixon rose from the political grave to seize and hold the presidency.

The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News - and Divided a Country

When Rupert Murdoch enlisted Roger Ailes to launch a cable news network in 1996, American politics and media changed forever. Now, with a remarkable level of detail and insight, New York magazine reporter Gabriel Sherman brings Ailes’s unique genius to life, along with the outsize personalities - Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Megyn Kelly, Sarah Palin, Karl Rove, Glenn Beck, Mike Huckabee, and others - who have helped Fox News play a defining role in the great social and political controversies of the past two decades.

All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid

In 1987, Gary Hart - articulate, dashing, refreshingly progressive - seemed a shoo-in for the Democratic nomination for president and led George H. W. Bush comfortably in the polls. And then: rumors of marital infidelity, an indelible photo of Hart and a model snapped near a fatefully named yacht (Monkey Business), and it all came crashing down in a blaze of flashbulbs, the birth of 24-hour news cycles, tabloid speculation, and late-night farce.

Publisher's Summary

One of the nation's most acclaimed journalists, The New York Times' Mark Leibovich, presents a blistering, penetrating, jaw-dropping - and often hysterical - look at Washington’s incestuous "media industrial complex".

The great thing about Washington is no matter how many elections you lose, how many times you're indicted, how many scandals you've been tainted by, well, the great thing is you can always eat lunch in that town again. What keeps the permanent government spinning on its carousel is the freedom of shamelessness, and that mother's milk of politics, cash.

In Mark Leibovich’s remarkable look at the way things really work in D.C., a funeral for a beloved television star becomes the perfect networking platform, a disgraced political aide can emerge with more power than his boss, campaign losers befriend their vanquishers (and make more money than ever!), "conflict of interest" is a term lost in translation, political reporters are fetishized and worshipped for their ability to get one's name in print, and, well - we're all really friends, aren't we?

What Julia Phillips did for Hollywood, Timothy Crouse did for journalists, and Michael Lewis did for Wall Street, Mark Leibovich does for our nation's capital.

Another case where the author makes his point early, so the later part of the book are examples after we've already been convinced: the Beltway Bubble is far more insular (inbred) than I'd thought ... and I'm a jaded political junkie! An Old Boys' (mostly male, but there are Old Girls, too) Network of overpaid "consultants" living off of the presumed "connections" between lavish parties. Instead of trickle-down, money there circulates laterally. By the end of the first audio part I'd heard enough, so put the book aside, coming back later, which didn't help. Inside story of a Hill staffer didn't work for me, so I ended up fast-forwarding through much of it. Pace picks up for the final 1/3 or so with a portrait of Hillary Clinton, followed by an analysis of the role of the D. C. press corps in the 2012 campaign ("spin rooms" are a vestigial non-necessity). Romney fans might take offense that their candidate is usually referred by the author as Mittens.

Overall, I found the tales of overpaid has-beens, and wanna-be's,a bit of a downer. Still, I thought it took guts for the author to write so honestly about folks he sees regularly. Recommended, though if you're looking for juicy details, there aren't really a lot. One point that stood out for me was Leibovich's regular mention of Tammy Haddad, a big party thrower (whom I'd not heard of before); seemed almost as though he feared she'd strike him from future guest lists if he didn't talk her up enough?

Depressing but not surprising about how things really work in the United STATE of America...:( If you can handle the truth (and perhaps if you're lucky, positively act on it) this title is definitely worth a listen.

One boo-boo in the performance that I have never encountered before in an audiobook: In Part II, Track 4, Chapter 10 of the book is repeated. Kinda threw me for a loop but fast forward to the next track when you get there and the performance moves on to Chapter 11...

Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?

Overall this was a good story. Not that many revelations but well a thought out book. Clearly something has went off the tracks in Washington DC, it is also clear that the overriding cause is money and the role it plays in American politics Without regard to Party or philosophical leanings, money has corrupted for the most part everyone engaged in government.

The other major issue as I see it is the press and their decision to walk away from actual reporting so as not to offend the ruling class and their corporate advertising clients. This book touches on this problem. For the most part, authors have been unwilling to point out their own role in the disintegration of American politics.

I'm a person that tries to read at least 4 news papers every day and have been doing so for some time and have witnessed this problem gradually manifest itself. It has been like the example of a frog in a pot of water on the stove. Unfortunately more and more people get their news from Comedy Central rather than the 6 PM news. Part of this has to do with the shot callers at networks and Editors of newspapers promoting news casters and print journalist based on reasons other than their journalistic ability. This has resulted in the dumbing down of content, I'm not sure if this is done for the audience or the walking haircuts now considered journalist. Another factor has been sites like Politico that turns politics into a celebrity game show like US or People is for movie stars. Politics should be treated different than Hollywood. The author does just that in this book and that is why I am recommending it.

Would I recommend it? yes

Would you be willing to try another book from Mark Leibovich? Why or why not?

Yes, I thought he was good author.

What about Joe Barrett’s performance did you like?

Yes, flawless.

Did This Town inspire you to do anything?

It actually made me more despondent in regards to the ruling elites of both Parties.

Any additional comments?

This was my first Audible book. The presenter did a great job but I still like books better for some reason.

Why don't things seem to work in America any more? The author, a Washington insider, dishes on his friends and sources to provide this glimpse into the world of the privileged charged with the people's business. He reveals specifics of their concern with image, connection and fortune while ignoring the fate of our nation.

have you spent significant time in washington DC ?do the inner workings of politics just fascinate you ?do you have a greater tolerance for gossip than your classmates ?

if so, this might be a very good book for youif not, you might find the book insular and a bit repetitiveit's basically a prolonged and chatty lesson on human nature

in 1975, 3 % of former congressmen became lobbyists in today's washington DC, the number has risen to about 40 %mr. leibovich would like to tell us just how that transition occurred

those in political power are a sad but predictable bunch of peoplep.j. o'rourke's book " parliament of whores " outlined them clearlyit's those next to power that are an even sadder, clumsier group

the press corp, legislative aides and socialites all buzz around DCthey all lack the power and leverage that money or electability bringsso they traffic in the only commodity left to them : relationships

mr. o'rourke's effective book commented on DC from the outsidesadly, mr. leibovich tries to the same from " inside the machine "it's a difficult task since the reader can often questions his motives

can mr. leibovich remain next to power without actually having power ?will all of his efforts keep the wolf of insignificance away from the door ?niccolo machiavelli would say no and he's probably right

Ok yes, it's a little bit dishy and gossipy--that's how you get a book published--but I get the sense Leibovich--an intrenched NYT correspondent-- pretty much burned his bridges to write some of the stuff that's in here.I downloaded this the day it came out and am honestly astonished there hasn't been more outrage. Seems like Leibovich is trying to make an important point, but obviously the majority of readers are missing it. (Maybe because they're all trying to figure out if they're in the book, or know someone who is?)

I've long talked others in DC who confirm what he's saying . The ruling class in DC is cashing out and "riding it down in style". In other words, they know the plane is going to crash, but not in their lifetime...hopefully...so, yeah, whatever.

Please listen to this book. Yes, its very funny and entertaining--Leibovich is skilled writer--but it also reveals a capital that every US citizen should be aware of.

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